Google Search Adds TV Listings, Podcasts

This week, at the National Association of Broadcasters conference, Google announced some new features that will be coming to Google search, making it much easier to find the content you want right away.

One feature specifically should help people find the next episode of their favorite TV show: users will be able to search for a show and see the next times it will be on TV as well as the channel. This will likely also be tied into voice search, making it much easier to learn when the new episode airs. This a powerful tool for Android TV if the feature is to arrive. It could search both cable channels and sources from Live Channels, tying into Android N’s recording APIs to make recording that episode straightforward.

Google is also touting better ads through its DoubleClick technology. They’ve used data analytics to string together better commercials based on what demographics are watching. Additionally, it’s getting smarter about which ads to string together; two car commercials in a row won’t happen.

With podcasts now in Google Play Music, Google is going to start highlighting them more. This includes showing and playing episodes in Google search results. This feature has not yet arrived on Android TVs, but it may soon along with an update to Google Play Music so that users can quickly subscribe to a given podcast.

Though Google I/O is less than a month away, there are small teasers of features being announced periodically. Hopefully these two features make their way to Android TV and allow for rich, seamless content consumption experiences.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.